Jubilee (19 page)

He pours his dose, hands shaking, the medicine spilling over and dripping sticky onto his pyjama bottoms. Then he picks himself off the floor and leaves the garage.

He doesn’t know how far Colette will go, or if he will be able to stop her. And if she exposes him? He’d lose everything, starting with his job. That would hit him hard: the loss of it, and the shame of that loss. But right now it’s not the job that takes up his thoughts, that forces him to stop at the bottom of the staircase and sit down. On the third stair is one of Mehul’s socks – just the one, balled up, inside out. He’ll have shucked it off and abandoned it, forgetting its existence in his pursuit of the next bit of fun. Satish’s life is full of detritus like this: single socks, half-read books, school bags, spilled milk on the table where they’ve been eating breakfast, mud down the back of his car seat, tell-tale sweet wrappers on the floors of their rooms, a toothbrush left on the side of the bath.

If Satish is exposed, Maya may leave him, and take the children with her. Colette threatens him with a tidy life. The thought leaches the blood from his face. He needs to see his kids.

In Asha’s room, he picks his way across the littered floor to her bed. He perches on the mattress and leans over her. In the half-dark, her face is a quick sketch, a handful of features intersected by the rise of her cheek. He puts his face into her hair and breathes in.

The book she was reading has fallen off the bed. Satish places it on her bedside table. He adjusts the duvet, covers an exposed foot. Her room is filled with evidence that she, even now, at eleven, is starting to grow up and away from him. He’s thought this before, thought how fast it’s all moving, but now he thinks he’d just like the chance to be here while she does it. There’s clothing on the floor of questionable appropriateness. There’s a photo collage of her friends above the bed: they stick their tongues out at the camera, they cuddle cats, they gurn. On another wall there’s a picture of her latest crush, a popstar who was doing GCSEs this time last year. He was discovered – she has explained this to Satish with great patience – when a camera crew visited his school to do a fly-on-the-wall documentary. Satish, equipped with his dad-response, felt that the boy would have been better off staying in class. But he’d just nodded and smiled.

On her desk is a pile of CDs, and he reaches out to tidy them, lining up the edges. The top one has a black and white photograph on the cover: a man smoking, his eyes half-closed as he inhales. This isn’t appropriate for a girl of eleven. He remembers the cigarette in Asha’s bag. It’s just this sort of image that … He sifts through the others. A line of young men looking sullen and unshaven; a girl on a bike, the CD case adorned with a ‘Parental Advisory’ sticker. The next one … the next one is
The Only Language They Understand
.

Here’s the picture again, lit with smears of colour, doctored so that Riot Act are sitting round the table with them. Here’s Satish, Cai’s arms around him, hat askew. As the adrenaline subsides, Satish thinks it’s like being phobic about spiders, or birds, or other commonplace things; half your terror is about when you might see them next. On the album cover, the lead singer has just taken a drag on his cigarette. Smoke eases out of his mouth. Neil Listick: that’s what he called himself. Inserted between Sarah and Peter, Neil Listick slumps, but his gaze is directed straight at the camera.

Satish has never heard Asha listening to Riot Act, or talking about them. Has she even listened to the album? Does she care about them, beyond her dad’s picture being on the cover? And if she’s interested in that, why has she never mentioned it to him?

When he leaves, he stands for a moment in the doorway and fixes the image in his mind. There may be a time when he needs this: Asha in the midden of her room, fast asleep and innocent.

In Mehul’s bedroom, Satish touches a panel on the lamp, calling up a rising tide of light that illuminates his son, head curled forwards on the pillow. He kneels next to Mehul’s bed and tucks him in. He looks at his profile: the Bhatt nose which his friend Tom has taken exception to. He hopes Maya’s right, that it’s just sticks and stones, playground politics. But he doesn’t think Maya’s ever encountered playground politics in quite the way he did, and he’s not sure he trusts her judgement on this. Tomorrow he’ll ask Mehul about it – subtly – to check if it’s still going on. He’ll watch for the signs.

Perhaps it’s the dose kicking in at last, but Satish feels calmer here. The blackmail is a problem to be solved, that’s all. He’s going to fix it. He lies down next to Mehul, who rolls onto his back and flops an arm out sideways. Satish lets it rest against his chest then reaches out and touches the lamp again, pulling darkness down into the room. He closes his eyes. There’s a margin of warmth around his son and he wants to stay within it. Just him and Mehul. It’ll be OK. He’s going to make sure of that.

Peter woke early on Jubilee morning, roused by noises from his daughter’s bedroom. He lay there listening to her bed squeak, to the curtain rings clatter. Jan slept on. He waited two minutes, three, then he went to fetch Colette.

‘I’ve been awake for ages!’ she told him.

‘I’d never have guessed.’

They slipped out of the house without disturbing the others, and he wondered how long it would take her to get bored, how long before Ram Patel started to grate on him. Looking up to gauge the weather, that British reflex, he could see it would be grim. Bits of blue, slabs of grey. The day felt chilly. As he stepped across his driveway the front door opposite swung open. Ram, dressed in a sweater and jacket, greeted him.

‘Good morning, Peter. I see you are ready for work.’

‘Yep, bang on time.’

‘Of course. Neeta’s been up for an hour already. I’m finding it best to stay out of the kitchen.’

Peter acknowledged this with an upthrust of his chin, making his usual internal adjustment to Ram’s speech, the regular peaks and troughs that put lilts in all the wrong places. ‘Right,’ he said, heaving up his garage door. ‘Ladders in here.’

They started at the other end of the street, working slowly towards their own homes. It went pretty smoothly, Peter directing things, Ram quietly efficient. As the morning went on, more front doors opened, and there was a stirring in Cherry Gardens. People commented on the bunting, offered help, bustled off to do their own jobs. Colette’s early enthusiasm did wane quickly, and she became restless. When the Hobbes’ door opened a few houses down, she darted forward – ‘Mandy!’ – then stopped and frowned.

‘Oh, it’s just her mum.’

‘A good thing, too,’ Peter told her. ‘She’s bringing us a cuppa. Cheers, Pam.’

‘No trouble,’ she said, handing up Ram’s. ‘You’ve got a Mandy Special there, Pete.’ He looked at the mug she’d given him. A rainbow arched its way around it, painted with a quavering hand, slivers of white showing between the strips of colour. Pam was smiling up at him.

‘Good girl,’ he said. ‘Tell her well done.’

Colette wandered off. The two men drew level with the Chandler house, then Peter’s own, then the Patels’. Up on the ladder, fixing a line of flags under the eaves, Peter came face to face with Ram’s son, Satish. On the other side of the glass he was just a few inches away, staring out at the street and the houses opposite. Satish acknowledged him with a little smile and a dip of the head, but he didn’t move as Peter worked on, and didn’t say a word to him either. It felt like insolence. Strange boy, he thought, and tried to quell his annoyance. Always quiet. Always had been.

He wondered what bound Satish and Cai together, and what future their friendship might reasonably have. The question was irrelevant really – in two months’ time Cai would be gone from Bourne Heath to their new life in South Africa; still, it gave Peter pause for thought. There could be no real future for a friendship like that. The boys inhabited different worlds, and the older they got the clearer that would become. Better for Cai to make a clean break now. Take today, for instance: there was Ram across the way, putting up bunting for an event that was not his celebration at all, really. A significant day for the English, but surely not for the … What were they, exactly? Indian? Ugandan? He had never been clear. But this was neither their country nor their culture, and no matter how many Union Jacks they raised, they would always be waving someone else’s flag.

Peter made the line secure and gave Ram a thumbs-up. He got down from the ladder, leaving Satish alone above him, gazing out of his window. In the end, like goes to like; a natural balance is in place. You could whine about it, and plenty of people did these days, but you couldn’t fight it.

When they’d finished their work, Peter found Colette idling in the road, itchy to get the party started. Must keep her occupied, he was thinking, and make sure that brother of hers is just as busy, keep him out of trouble. And where was Jan, for God’s sake? These were his preoccupations in the slow seconds it took for him to turn away from his daughter and glance down the street at his handiwork.

Timing is everything. In the perfect choreography of the moment he raised his head as the sky darkened, dimming the reflection off the line of windows above them, and a movement suddenly caught his eye, just … there. There, in Satish’s room.

Despite the distance, the pane of glass between them, Peter recognised her immediately and from the gut. Then Satish reached out to touch her, held on to her arm, came towards her, ducking his head in an echo of that nod with which he had acknowledged Peter’s presence earlier that morning. That cunning semblance of shyness. Girls always like that, and Mandy clearly did, because all of a sudden he kissed her, and she let him. It took Peter a couple of seconds to process what he was seeing, and then he understood, and he wanted to shout, to grab a brick and fling it at the window.

Instead he drew breath and yanked Colette back as if, failing all else, he could at least pull her out of the way of this thing. Then the two of them waited, passive spectators, to see what Mandy would do next. She’d been released by Satish so she could have walked out, could have done it easily. Instead, and without hesitation, she stepped back towards him and kissed him – so confident, so grown-up – on the mouth. The wrongness of it disabled Peter. He felt out of control, not an adult any more. The little bastard, he thought. He said it out loud, not loud enough, though. ‘Little bastard. Little Paki bastard.’ Somewhere below him, he heard an ‘oh!’ of surprise: Colette. Calm down, he told himself. You can deal with this. Think of the best way. Give yourself some time.

‘Go on in,’ he said to Colette. ‘Get inside.’ He thought for a moment. He had to get her out of the way – but what next? Then he knew. ‘I want Cai out here. Now.’

By mid-morning on Jubilee Day, Peter reckoned he’d done his bit. The decorations were up, trestles out, the rain-washed street ready for the party. He could see women bearing down on the empty tables with cloths and cups so he left them to it. Colette would stay to help or hinder. He could pop inside for a while, just until it was time to light the barbecue.

The house was silent. Peter stood for a moment and listened, then slipped into the kitchen. He was peckish, wanted something, not quite sure what, and rummaged around for a handful of custard creams. He had a tune in his head, the music from that bread advert; ‘Doo-doo-doo-dee-doo, doo-dee-doo-dee-doo’. He walked into the sitting room, narrating – ‘It were rough in t’ Bourne ’eath …’ smiling at his own wit.

In the sitting room, Jan was waiting for him, and in that moment he knew, even as he was concealing his mild shock at seeing her there, he knew she’d found him out.

‘Hello, darling.’ He smiled narrowly. ‘Thought I’d grab a few minutes’ peace.’

Jan looked up at him from her armchair, head tilted, body still.

‘Good timing, Peter. I wanted to talk to you. Why don’t you sit down?’ He felt himself instantly rising to annoyance and he worked to slow his ascent, a diver trying to avoid the bends. He sat as bidden, and she peered at him curiously. Her eyes were pink, a little closed-up.

‘I found the oddest thing this morning in our building society book. I can’t make head nor tail of it. Wondered if you could help me.’ She reached over to the coffee table, where their savings book lay, its front cover bent up with repeated opening. She offered it to him.

I can’t take it, he thought, or I’ll look like I’m buying into this, like I’m a kid and she’s the teacher. He realised he was still clutching the custard creams and relocated them to the settee in one brisk movement.

‘Jan, I think I know what you’re—’

‘No,’ she dead-ended him. ‘No, do look at it. Go on – it’s really odd.’

‘There’s no need. I know what—’

‘
Look
at it.’

She was unrelenting. Peter reached out for the book and turned to the most recent page. He scanned the deposits and withdrawals, which were just as he knew they would be. This was always going to happen, he reminded himself. Concentrate, get your story right; there’s nothing she can do about it. Jan was speaking again.

‘What’s strange, if you look on that page there, what’s really odd is that the money we saved for South Africa – you see there, the £700 left after we’d bought the boat tickets? – that money’s gone down. Someone’s taken £300 out, a couple of weeks ago. Looks like your signature, right there.’

She pointed to the incriminating knot of ink, her hand shaking. He wondered if he could derail this right now with some tenderness, take her fingers in his and hold them, stroke her and pacify her. It didn’t seem likely; she was all hard lines, her mouth, her cheekbones, the V of her lapels levelled at him, the glossy helmet of her hair armour against his advances.

‘The thing is, Peter, we must have saved up for – what? – two years to get this money? Now half of it is gone. Any ideas?’

He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. ‘I know. I know about this. I mean, I did this. I should have told you earlier.’

‘And you didn’t because?’ Mock puzzlement.

‘I knew you’d be angry, Jan. I knew you’d be like this.’